Extras! 30 July 2014

Welcome to The Extras! A daily dose of all the smaller movie related news, clips and just plain cool stuff that you might have missed!

Just when you thought the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie had stopped upsetting people, Paramount Australia tweets a new poster for the film along with the movie’s Aussie release date. What’s wrong with that, you ask? Well, let’s see… The movie is releasing on September 11, and the poster features the Turtles jumping out of an exploding skyscraper. Needless to say Paramount Australia have since deleted the tweet and issued an apology for their cowabungling.

SyFy’s 12 Monkeys TV series just got a couple of expansions to their troop, one of which is rather major. Tom Noonan (Hell on Wheels) and Emily Hampshire (Rookie Blue) have joined the cast of the show based on Terry Gilliam’s twisty 1995 movie of the same name. Noonan plays a newly created villainous character, who “is the face of the enigmatic Army of the 12 Monkeys”, but it’s Hampshire’s character that is of the most interest. She will be playing Jennifer Goines, a female version of Jeffrey Goines, the insane character played so brilliantly by Brad Pitt in the original movie. Other than her gender, Jennifer’s character still appears to be the same though, described as “a dangerous, unstable mental patient who might have the key to unraveling the 12 Monkeys mystery locked away in her head”.

Star Wars: Episode VIII writer-director Rian Johnson doesn’t just make awesome movies like Looper and Brick, but he’s a pretty awesome guy as well. Exhibit A in his awesomeness is the latest Filmspotting podcast [via Sun Times] in which Johnson takes part, and wherein he breaks all the secrecy to tell us about how he’s “really excited about all the things I can’t tell you [about Star Wars: Episode VIII]”.

He also gives a breakdown of the type of movies that he’s watching to influence his direction, as well as explaining exactly how he got the gig, saying “I can only assume it was a clerical error, like in the movie ‘Brazil.’ There’s a ‘Brian Johnson’ out there who is really mad.”

And sticking with Guardian, co-writer Nicole Perlman was a product of Marvel’s internal screenwriting program, and once she had “graduated”, she was apparently given a range of comic book properties she could tackle. She picked Guardians because of her love for space stories, immersed herself in all the Guardians source material for two years and, along with the later help of director James Gunn, cranked out one of the most crazy, mindblowingly fun movies I have ever seen. But according to an interview Perlman had with Time, her picking Guardians was a bit of a surprise.

“I can’t tell you what the other titles were that they were offering up on the table, but I can tell you that one of them was a little bit more appropriate for me, just based on gender. I think they were a little taken aback when I chose Guardians, because there were ones that would make a lot more sense if you were a romantic-comedy writer or something like that.”

So what could those other assumedly female led titles have been? We’ve been hearing rumblings about a Black Widow solo movie for ages, and a Ms/Captain Marvel movie is almost an inevitability at this point, but the “romantic-comedy” angle is throwing my guessing game way off here.

Looks like Warner Bros is really sticking to their “At least one franchise with a dragon minimum at all times” rule. With Harry Potter done (for now) and The Hobbit trilogy about to wrap up, the studio has been trying to find a replacement big-budget fantasy franchise, and they may just have found it. Deadline are reporting that WB have just bought the rights to Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern fantasy novel series, which boasts plenty of draconian material to adapt in its 22-volume, nearly 40-year history. The series’ first book, Dragonflight, follows a group of warriors who ride telepathic, fire-breathing dragons as they attempt to defend the alien planet of Pern from “a terrifying airborne menace — a rain of deadly spores that comes with the orbit of the Red Star.”

One of the hardest part of writing movie reviews, I find, is summarizing a film’s premise succinctly. Maybe I would be better at it if I played against James Franco and Jimmy Fallon in their game of 5-second film summaries.

Just as I predicted in my crystal ball earlier today, we are definitely are not seeing any grey-haired, catsuit wearing fighters in Arrow anytime soon. Well, unless John Barrowman decides to get up to his old tricks, that is. JR Ramirez (Emily Owens, M.D.) has been cast as a much younger Ted “Wildcat” Grant, whose retooled origins now see him as “a former boxer [with a mysterious past] who now runs a gym for underprivileged youth” and who “will play a pivotal role in Laurel Lance’s arc this season”.

Since this is the guy who trained the original Black Canary in the comics, I think it’s a safe bet that this is one more addition to the long running rumour that Laurel is going to take over from her sister and become the new Canary on the show.

It’s the crossover British people and maybe some other geeks all over the world have been waiting for! Doctor Who meets Sherlock Holmes! With music!

If you have anything you would like to contribute to Extras, whether it be interesting stories, funny videos, or artistic photos of yourself in morally questionable poses, feel free to drop a mail to [email protected]

A man of many passions - but very little sleep - I've been geeking out over movies, video games, comics, books, anime, TV series and lemon meringues as far back as I can remember. So show up for the geeky insight, stay for the delicious pastries.

Competitions

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is apparating into cinemas today, which should get all the Potterheads out there screaming in delight. And we're adding to that excitement by revealing the five winners of magical movie hampers worth R2000 each.

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